I decline to get into deep debates over symbolism, because sometimes things look like symbols to me that other people don’t get.
The point is, that we can count on the scriptures to give us a guide without awkwardly having to footnote it with scientific explanation. Science came later. If science has a problem, it’s up to science to solve it (and general relativity can, even if it isn’t the only way).
Science, i.e., Kurt Friedrich Gödel, has “proven” that we can’t know all the answers, and also that there has to be a “God” who created everything and is “Good”. So the only way to know what is going on is for the Creator of the Universe to have given us a record that we can read. The record would have to be self-validating, as the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is.
In addition, all the “laws of nature” that we can discover literally fall apart if there aren’t boundary conditions. So it is literally true that “God holds the whole world in His hand”.
So the Bible is the revelation of the boundary conditions for the Universe and all the events in it. That means that any civilization that forbids the studying of the Bible as part of “science” will be forever lost.